Welcome back to the Bank of America Financial Services Conference. If you're joining us, you're in the Principal Financial slot of the experience. We're really excited to have Amy Friedrich, who is the Head of U.S. Insurance at Principal. We also have Humphrey Lee, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Development and whatnot. Let me give you a little background information. Amy's been with Principal since 2000. It's a real lifer, you know, like.
That, that doesn't even make me nearly the longest lifer.
Are you sure?
Yeah.
No. Formerly, you ran the group benefits business, beginning in 2008, I believe.
Yep.
Including oversight of individual disability. You're active in the United Way.
Yep.
Humphrey, who was a formidable competitor for many years, Dowling & Partners. He chose to hang up the gloves and have one buy recommended stock on this platform. We're really pleased to have both Amy and Humphrey here. Thank you. If there's any questions at any point of in the, my Q&A, feel free to raise your hand. I don't stand on any ceremony. Unless there's that, I'll just get started.
You bet.
All right.
Let's go.
Let's talk about group benefits a little bit.
You bet.
Where is the sweet spot for Principal for Principal? Yeah, the wrong room.
I don't know what Principal is.
There's a sweet spot for Principal in terms of the customer size, but where can you go and where the opportunities stretching outside of your core competency?
Sure. When I think of the group benefits business, we basically would say our core market in group benefits is any employer that has less than 200 employees. We do a pretty reasonable cut at 200 employees. That doesn't mean we don't have companies in our portfolio that are in more of that mid-market, but you won't find a lot of jumbo business in our portfolio. Our average size of an employer that we provide benefits and services to, though, is about 40 lives. They have about 40 people that they employ, and that is definitely a sweet spot. We feel very comfortable that our capabilities can move up into 100, 150, 200 lives. That's kind of mid-market for us in our terminology.
Are you reliant on brokers and consultants in order to distribute that? Can you talk a little about how the distribution relationship goes sometimes?
Sure. Sure. The, the smaller you are in terms of an employer, the more you statistically just rely on a broker advisor to give you advice. They're usually getting a process where that broker or advisor has a really heavy role, not just in recommending who they use, but actually staying attached on an ongoing basis, they might even be helping with the amendment or ongoing record keeping. That broker or advisor stays very close to that small business. We have wholesalers pointed out towards that marketplace who work with, I would say 10 years ago, we had a lot of mom-and-pop shops, so all around the United States. We don't really have a lot of geographic concentration. Some people think because we're an Iowa-based company, we'd have a lot of Midwest concentration.
We do a lot of nice business on the East Coast, a lot on the West Coast, a lot in Texas, a lot in Florida. We used to use probably not the national names, but more of the regional or mom-and-pop. A lot of those mom-and-pop shops have turned into a relationship with other consolidated groups now. You think of more a HUB, a OneDigital. There's been some acquisition happening in that space. Those people that have stayed focused on that small and mid-market that have done more consolidating, we have really strong relationships with nearly all of those distributors.
The relationship with the distributors, to what extent do the end customer, and not even the employees, but the employers themselves, do they associate the relationship with Principal itself or the distribution-?
Yeah.
...such that you become embedded in how they do their business?
Yeah. It's a fair question. They think of the benefits kind of broker as kind of the first stop. What I would say is we have a lot of really high utilization products. When we look at those high utilization products, those are gonna be like dental, vision, short-term disability, and the dental is gonna come with, like, a dental card. It'll have a dental card with it that they'll understand that Principal is that key relationship point. What I think is different for us, though, is we don't just necessarily sit on a spreadsheet and run a rate. We actually have ongoing communication. For example, one of our key distributors just held their national sales conference. I was on stage with them talking to the CEO because they look at us as a technology partner.
They look at us as if we're gonna do better APIs and build that together with each other, let's both get some economic value out of that. There's real partnership that happens with those distributors, and then they translate that to saying, "Principal's gonna have your claim covered. Principal's gonna have your additional coverages, and I'm gonna recommend those additional coverages." We get really nice connectivity with the distributors that passes on to the business owner.
Earlier today, we had MetLife sitting in the same chairs you're sitting in right now. Obviously a formidable competitor in the jumbo market with clients 5,000 lives and higher.
Yep.
Can you talk a little about the difference in customer care in the...
Yeah.
..100 to 200 type employer group versus. We don't see MetLife coming into your customer base, and you're not going there. I mean, is it that there's a lot of small employers all over the country? Could be really right? What are you doing differently that it takes a different skill set to appeal to the sort of that customer base?
MetLife, by the way, great industry partner. When we've got an industry issue, MetLife's always there advocating for things in that employee benefits realm. I have a ton of respect for what MetLife does. Factually, the way you do underwriting, the way you do relationship management, the way you even do product design and reporting is nearly completely different for a jumbo case versus a case that has 50 people who work for them. Those employers who have 50 people, they don't have an HR department. Almost anything that Met has built a pipe to, built a relationship management function to, even built some of the underwriting based on the prior experience, those things all depend on an HR department.
What we would say is we've taken that space where there's not an HR department or if there is an HR department, they certainly haven't grown to the point where they have a benefits expert and an enterprise HR system that they've put in place. When we're connecting our infrastructure, our technology, our ongoing administration, we're prioritizing things like that business owner can't possibly deal with six bills for six different coverages. It's basic things like one bill. It's basic things like we've got, if the broker is using a technology and there's a broker intermediated technology, we're connected via APIs to those broker intermediated technologies, so that if they got an address change, they put it in. They don't have to put it in with us, with this 1, with someone else. They put it in one time, and we're doing real-time data exchange.
We've built our relationship with the broker advisor and the end business owner without an HR department. It also means that there's some natural moats then. What you built to service someone who has 10,000 employees is not at all what you would build for someone who has 10 or 15 or 20 employees. We have some natural spaces in the marketplace that I think are serving us well. The last point I would mention is, if you're a MetLife, when you're winning and losing in that jumbo space, you're doing it all through takeover. It is a fully penetrated marketplace. Everyone has those benefits. When we're winning or losing in the small case market, we're doing it often with actual new market production.
Only about 50% of the employers in that space currently offer a benefit that is the benefits that we offer. When you truly have the ability to both capture from competitors, add additional coverages because they don't have it yet, or add a coverage for the very first time, that gives us levers that are probably a little bit different than you see in the large market.
I think about employers 200 and under. If I want to compare life, disability, dental, how well penetrated are these basic coverages? Like, in my mind, and I feel like life and disability seems like the core course. Obviously, Principal's a great dental business.
Yeah.
Like, but it seems like a later stage offering for an employer they offer. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's penetration rates-
I think you're wrong. Should I tell you you're wrong on Friday?
Yeah, please do. Please do.
Okay. I'm gonna call them the consumable coverages. A lot of times small businesses are putting that in place because they feel sort of paternalistically they wanna take care of their employees. If they're doing that, a lot of times they do lead with a life and a disability benefit. If they're doing it in response to their employees are asking for it, employees are often asking for dental and vision. Dental, vision, accident, critical illness, employees tend to hear about those, and they tend to be really highly consumable. Like, the minute you have the benefit, you have an ability to use it. We would actually. Again, we don't really have a preference on how the relationship starts.
We have a preference on where it ends up with us, but we don't really have a preference on where it starts. If it's employee-driven requests, dental or vision is the first one placed. If it is employer taking care of their employees, often life and disability are the first one placed.
Where do you think the market is in terms of penetration among mid to small employers, with each of these products they are offering these?
Dental is probably still the most highly penetrated because again, it's a product that gets asked for. Like, when you go from employer to employer, they'll ask, "Do I have dental coverage?" When you look at life, like group life and group disability, whether it's short-term disability or long-term disability, if you look at employers that have fewer than 100 employees, you're probably still only looking at 40% of them have that coverage available. There's still a lot of green space in terms of open market, but you do have to figure out how you get your distribution there, how you use your technology to make it efficient, and how you get the business owners to understand the value it will provide.
The last two years have been when there's a war for talent, it's a great environment to make the argument for group benefits. We're finding as much fertile ground in that group benefits argument as we've had in a decade.
You can also correct me. When you acquired First Dental in 2012, in my mind, that's Principal going nationwide in some ways. Felt you added California to the repertoire and if I look over that decade-long period, it says here correct me, dental vision growing at a 7.2% CAGR.
Mm-hmm.
Group disability growing at 7.9% CAGR. Group life growing at a 4.5%. If I'm trying to figure out how much of that is market penetration, how much of that is rate and maybe life lags because the interest rate environment has been so low, so the value of those products has accrued less over... Why is, I guess, surprisingly, disability the fastest growing?
Yeah.
Of these products?
Part of that is a little bit of function of our supplement. Our supplement has a group disability line in it, which is where you're appropriately taking your growth rate. Actually, accident and critical illness, we've introduced those two products in the last three to four years. Those flow up through our disability line. When you take accident and critical illness, and by the way, we're introducing hospital indemnity as well. When you take those, I'm gonna call them worksite products. When you take those worksite products back out of the group disability line, it's actually closer to kinda that dental growth rate. I would say dental and vision have been dental, vision, and then disability have been growing at kinda similar rates. Group life probably has been growing a little bit more, I'm gonna call it, through amendments or amended coverage.
Here's a great example. When you're in the small market, a lot of small businesses will start with a flat benefit, maybe even just 10,000. That means you have a 10,000 life, $10,000 coverage benefit. You're counted as being covered at that point, so you've got a coverage in place. When you're growing that, moving up to a flat benefit of 25 or a flat benefit of 50, that, you know, counts towards your new sales a little more incrementally in terms of your premium growth, but it's really nice premium growth on some of the existing cases that we already have. Group life tends to get some base coverage in place and then do additional things. You tend to, when you put dental in, you put dental in. When you put vision in, you put vision in.
You don't necessarily make plan design changes on top of that.
Changing gears a little bit. I'm an over-insured person. I got so much whole life insurance, like, I don't know, probably I made a mistake somewhere.
You have whole life insurance. Okay.
You know.
All right. We'll talk about that later.
You know, Since I know what's happening, I know it's growing. I'm worth more dead than alive. It's perfect for my kids. They love it, you know.
Okay.
You know, as a naturally, over-insured person, I'm probably an easy target. One day I called the insurance person, "Price me out an individual disability policy." I have some individual disability with work. It's not a lot, but, I don't know if I'll have the job, and maybe I wanna get something more permanent.
Mm-hmm.
When I saw the price as someone who's absolutely willing to pay the toll.
You said, "Yes, I'm buying it today.
I said, There's no way in hell. Everybody dies, but not everybody gets disabled. I can't believe this product costs this much money. Has the industry done a bad job educating people? I think I'm an easy sell. You know, Rube, you could have gotten to buy it, and I won't buy it at all. What is the disconnect here between the value provided by disability insurance and the fact that I can't see it?
It's an interesting question. Let me take you through just sort of the maybe some of the incident stats and then, and place it in the framework of working population. A lot of... Okay, obviously individual life policies, if you wanna keep them in force, if they have the account value to... Again, it depends on how you constructed that policy. There's many people who have needed that individual life coverage through their life while they've had a family at home, while they've had a mortgage, while they've had things that they needed to make sure that their beneficiaries or heirs could pay off. If you're not using it for kind of complex estate planning or tax planning purposes, there are a lot of people by the end of their life who've made the decision.
They know what they're doing, they've appropriately made that, where they don't have life insurance by the time they could actually get the benefit. Disability is one of those that the likelihood. It only applies when you have an income, essentially. It's limited to when you have an income. It is limited to when you have an income, and it's limited then to kinda your working age population. The incidence amount of disability at working age population versus the incidence amount for like a group life policy, it's actually higher for individual disability. It is. You can use everyone's gonna die, not everyone's gonna come disabled.
It's actually more likely that you're going, in your working age population, that you're going to have an accident and need time away from work where your income's protected as opposed to have a death event during your working years. The incident rates are actually different, and the way Principal uses that is that Principal has done mostly for our individual disability. We actually aren't in the, no offense, but you're not our core market. We would not be thinking that retail sale is really where we use our individual disability product. We use it as more of a business product.
If we've worked with an architectural firm and there's maybe four of the chief, you know, the primary architects of the firm, and they've got a group disability coverage that's doing a nice protection coverage for the staff or other workers, but it doesn't give them the protection coverage. We would have like a multi-life policy for individual disability that would place on top of that. We'd have actual business owner products that would maybe take care of the overhead expense or those types of business owner disability events. Our coverage in general tends to be a little different than the industry, rather than just that sheer retail day-to-day fighting to argue someone should get disability insurance. Does that help at all?
Yeah, I guess. I mean, I assume it's like, of course, you're trying to make profit off it, but it's fairly priced. It doesn't seem fairly priced to me. I don't know. I'm like, I will die. I may become disabled, but the portable insurance is important for me, life insurance, I guess. Portable disability didn't seem-
Yeah.
Like, I don't know. We'll, we'll see. Hopefully I don't become disabled.
I'll keep track of your incidents rate over time.
Well, I'll let you know.
Okay. Okay.
All right. let's talk about a little more on benefits. That was my own... I was just price shopping there, by the way.
You should get disability insurance if anyone's depending on your income. We can talk about that later as well.
All right.
Okay.
Very well.
Mm-hmm. Yep.
We're working. I have some.
Okay.
Just don't have portable disability.
Great. Great.
Among, the growth opportunity, within both the employer and at the employee level, how many employers are only at one product with Principal and can be upsold to two or three? How many employers have multiple products that the employee has only bought one Principal product such that you have a captive audience for growth..
Yeah
... that just needs to be tweaked a little bit to energize it?
Yeah. When we deconstruct our block, most of the employers that we're working with are offering multiple benefits. We sit between, you know, 2.7 and 3. coverages, whether you're talking about an in-force case or a new sale case. They have two or three coverages. The most common profile that we have is an employer-paid, 100% employer-paid coverage complemented by one voluntary coverage. That's the most common kind of profile we have. One or more of the coverages, if they have three, as an example, in terms of our in-force block, the most common profile is probably two of them are employer-paid and one of them is made available on a voluntary basis. We don't...
At any given point, we might have 20% of our block sitting with one coverage at any given point. What we tend to find, though, is by year three, by year four, by year five, that one has changed to two, that two has changed to three. We specifically have an account management force and an in-force management process that we look to increase future sales. Again, we want to do it appropriately with the business line, but if they don't have some of those base benefits, we're gonna be talking to them about it at the next renewal and the next renewal. By the way, we're usually back every year talking to them because the vast majority of our block is one-year term, one-year renewable. We don't tend to do a lot of multi-year rate guarantees.
Generally speaking, if I go for the, that, renewal season and in year X it looks like this and there's a bunch of different brands and probably one product for each brand, and maybe there's one brand for each product, and it could be multiple Principal products, but it's not. In the next year, is it obviously they're happy with your services, the price? Like how do you displace a carrier who is selling the exact same product you are? What causes that switch to get them to incrementally-
Yeah
... say we'd rather have Principal providing multiple products to us instead of going to a different vendor for each?
Number 1, keep in mind, going back to sort of core premise, most of our smaller employers don't have an HR department. The likelihood of them having made a decision to have one coverage over here and one coverage over here and one coverage over here is not quite as likely as mid or large case.
I don't know, maybe the distributor made that decision.
Right. Right. Right.
Like the... Yeah.
Right. They tend to try to bundle right from the beginning, if that's appropriate for that business owner. When we win on our products, you know, the pricing and the product design were so much more compelling. There's a lot of commonality in the pricing and the product design. Where we have found our sweet spot tends to be what we can do on the administrative capabilities. I know it sounds basic, but one bill, there's a ton of people probably in your coverage universe for employee benefits that don't deliver one bill.
For the last, I think eight years, seven years, any new product or any product enhancements that we have done, we have made it so that before we release it out into the marketplace, we have to be able to deliver it on that same bill. Whether it's a voluntary coverage being paid for by the employee or an employer-paid coverage, we want it producing on one bill. That means you actually have to have a hierarchy. Like, you have to know the employer has employees, and you can do hierarchy-based billing. That type of capability, when it's not well understood, it gets delivered to the office manager or the business owner. Their first call is either to us or to their broker or advisor.
What the broker or advisor knows is if we can increase the ease of doing business, the likelihood they'll recommend us again on fairly like pricing and product is really high. That's how we win a lot of the times.
This might be an opportunity to bring Humphrey in a little bit too.
Yeah, that'd be great.
You know.
He's just sort of, you know.
You know.
Eye candy up here at this point.
Of course, of course.
Yeah.
I'd say it's the same question told two different ways: How do the insurance businesses at Principal bring the whole firm to bear on what they can offer customers or vice versa? How does the rest of the firm bring the insurance offerings of the firm to be a one-facing type organization..
Mm-hmm.
..that helps an integrated approach into satisfying client needs?
I think when you look back at the strategic review that we did, one thing that we're focusing on is how we go to market, go to the employers, go to the business owners with an integrated model, and then focusing on ease of doing business. Oftentimes from USI's perspective, the specialty benefit products help solve a protection problem for a employer or for the employees. At the same time, from the retirement solution perspective, again, helping them solve their business needs. On the from an insurance, the life insurance side, that also funneled through into the general account of an asset management perspective. The non-qualified products that we offer through the life insurance solutions factor into the retirement piece, because, again, we are a total retirement solution provider.
Whether it is your 401(k) defined benefit, ESOP, pension risk transfer, non-qualified, we provide these solutions for them to manage the business owners' needs. I think that's kind of how we come to market with that kind of integrated model to solve their problems.
What we're also seeing is that probably 10 years ago, there weren't a lot of distributors that, again, I told you it was kind of a lot of mom and pop, a lot of smaller kind of regional or local market players. Consolidation has increased, what we're finding is more of those distributor relationships have a really healthy, thriving, I'm going to call it like sort of retirement practice. They also have a healthy group benefits or employee benefits practice. Those places where we can start to do things like build common experiences, build common technology, those have been good points that have made a difference in terms of Principal. I think the piece that Humphrey mentioned there, too, is I think there's a thought that our life insurance business just kind of sits out there with that business focus.
50% of it. I'm responsible for Principal for the non-qualified business. That non-qualified deferred comp business is mine to own and manage to help the retirement business grow. It's one of the pillars of the retirement business. When we put any new non-qualified deferred comp plan in place, about half the time it's funded by a life insurance product. That life insurance interconnectivity with that business owner that we've done consulting with is really high, even though it's coming from not a group product, but an individual product.
If we forgot, like, let's say, our retirement business and is the bring the whole firm approach, is that going to the distributor or, I mean, of course it may be both, or is it going to the controller at some company with, you know, 82 employees that we're bringing the whole firm to that person? It might be some of both.
Yeah.
Are the same people who are distributing group benefits also helping distribute a retirement plan for the customer?
The licensing is completely different.
Yeah. Right.
The same person carrying dual licensing doesn't happen as much as the firm has relationships in distribution, relationships in retirement and relationships in group benefits. It's more that it gets pulled together at the firm level. I would say what we probably work with as much as the broker and intermediary is we work with directly with the business owner. When we're doing things, talking with the business owner, and often it's the broker consultant who trusts us enough to say, "We're just gonna let Principal come in and do some consulting with you." We're gonna do things like an informal business valuation. We're gonna help them understand what their business is worth. We're gonna look at the structure of their company. Is it, you know, a family-held company? Is it an S corp?
What kind of structure, what kind of tax implications are you wanting to look at? If you don't have a transfer of business, a succession plan in your family, no one from your family wants to do that, maybe you could look at an ESOP, which again, is gonna be back to the retirement side of the house. Maybe you can look at employee stock option purchase plan so that you can transfer some of that ownership of the company. That's the type of consulting that an intermediary has often given us a door to move in. When we do that type of consulting, year three, year four, year five, they tend to be repeat purchasers from Principal, and we like that.
When we made the strategic decision to move away from the retail life sales, just the pure retail life insurance sales, one of the reasons we made that decision was because when we looked at year 3,4,5,6, those relationships translating, that retail life insurance sale only translated to another relationship with Principal about 12% of the time. If it started with a business sale, it translated at about 50% conversion. We like our go-forward business strategy in terms of the interconnectivity.
Let's talk a little about underwriting.
Yeah.
How has COVID made any changes? I mean, there's this, there's two different schools of thought. One is that, I think I mean, I was talking to Globe and they sort of corrected me, but I don't think I'm exactly wrong. Spanish flu of 1918 took place in 1917, just like COVID-19 took place in 2020.
Yes.
You're one year off. About once every 100 years. Like, no, no, there was SARS. There was something that happened in 1956. Yeah, I know there was SARS, we had a multimillion dollar death pandemic once in 100 years.
Mm-hmm.
Maybe some people were surprised we had not had a pandemic more so. There's a lot of sociologists out there say, "Yeah, it's like a once every 30 year type thing." My goodness, I hope it's not once every 30 years.
I don't wanna do this again.
I don't wanna do this again.
Yeah, I don't wanna do this again.
On the one hand, look, to what extent is the experience of a semi-irregularly occurring pandemic in the pricing? Is there a different price now? On the other hand, there is the argument that, well, it affected people's comorbidities and the remaining population is probably on average a little bit healthier...
Mm-hmm.
Than the pre-COVID population, and you have long COVID. I mean, have we made changes to underwriting? Should we be making changes to underwriting?
Yeah. Boy, our underwriters and actuaries could, like, talk about this. Like, get them in a room and it's six days later and they haven't agreed on anything. What I would say is, we know that our pandemic. We did stress testing and scenario testing exercises, and we always had a pandemic scenario in that. I would say the usefulness of that pandemic scenario in this real life scenario was limited. Let's just be honest that our planning on that was fairly limited. Here's some things I'm seeing, and they make a difference in how we think about risk, how we think about pricing, and how we think about underwriting. One of them is, I do think we're seeing some evidence that, of, it's not gonna sound very sympathetic, but can it carry forward deaths?
Those deaths that we pulled forward that we're gonna have, they were older age population. They maybe had some conditions anyway that was gonna mean that they were probably closer to the span of their lifespan than they were further away.
I think it's very hard to talk about.
I know.
Yeah.
We've pulled some of those forward. At the same time, we've seen delayed care. We've seen some instances of delayed care, so we're seeing a little bunchiness in terms of what we see there. What I would argue though, one of the pieces that's just starting to emerge, and I think it's really interesting in a coverage like group disability, is the ability to put out there tools that help people be really productive. Whether they're tools that could help visually impaired learners. Again, when everyone was doing everything remotely, there were tools that helped visually impaired. There were tools that helped hearing impaired. There were tools that made handicap accessibility not as obvious. There were things that allowed technology so that you could contribute remotely, you could attach files onto. Everyone's phone or computer has those technologies.
There is, in my mind, some emerging trends and evidence that would say an ability for someone to work outside of a crowded workspace in a hybrid or fully remote setting with very accessible accommodation tools is probably helping return to work. It's probably meaning that someone didn't necessarily have to, if they were immunocompromised to begin with, they didn't have to go back into the workforce and suffer the consequences of a disability on that. I think hybrid and remote work might be changing some of the underlying long-term fundamentals of what we assume on some of our group disability incidents, return to work assumptions.
I think the response to COVID, which is hybrid, remote working technology, rapid technology infusion for the workforce, has really yet to be seen in terms of what that could do to some of our underwriting assumptions for something like disability.
As of yet, the underwriting has not changed.
It really has not fundamentally changed.
Okay. At what point, I mean, we talk about it, I'm a property and casualty guy by trade, you know, and I mean, you learn something in a given year and you change everything, and then you change it back.
Right.
Everyone's moving those assumptions around all the time. How long does it take for information to happen on a mortality table or a disability table before you think it's appropriate to take action?
Individual companies rarely take action. We use great trade groups like Society of Actuaries, do studies, make recommendations. Our reinsurers tend to see full populations as opposed to just our own insured populations. I would say industry groups, industry consulting studies, as coupled with reinsurance studies are the things that over time tend to move an insurer to change their pricing.
Along those lines, I guess in the first year of the pandemic, we saw a huge surge in retail life sales.
Yeah.
Some of the people were really worried about it.
We did.
Maybe they got in at a good price because the mortality tables weren't changed. I guess some people were able to arb that out a little ways. Also, on the employer side, you know, consultants and distributors were not welcome on premises of employers during that time. The ability to plead your case for was delayed probably in terms of what you can do for the companies. Where has the sales cycle shaken out right now? Are we right back where we were? Have we pulled forward some sales? Into the past then that was-
Mm-hmm.
What do you think about the sales cycle from here?
We're pretty much back to where we were in terms of access and information. I would say we might even be a little better equipped. I think our salespeople are better equipped to do remote work. They have more options on how they can communicate. There were still some pockets of our business where we were lying, especially in the small business market, on paper, with brokers and advisors being some of the last holdouts. I think COVID has shifted everybody..
Mm-hmm.
-to sort of an electronic standard. I think that electronic standard is making us more efficient with things like delivery of materials, e-signatures. The adoption of those things is probably accelerating some portions of the sales process. I would put the sales process back on par to even slightly faster or ahead of what we were doing prior to COVID-19.
The hiring of individuals who can help facilitate those relationships. Is the staffing of your distribution force larger than it was pre-COVID? About the same size? Is the tenure of the people who are doing this-
I'm gonna speak less for the industry and more just for Principal here.
I only want Principal.
Okay. For Principal, our tenure is as long as it's ever been, so we have highly tenured, highly experienced professionals. When I looked last week, we literally had one opening on sales. In the time I've owned responsibility for the business, I've never been as fully staffed as we are right now. My belief is that Principal is an employer of choice in the group benefits marketplace. We're seen as having good tools, good future progress, and very few changes that have happened that maybe there's other changes around the industry that are happening a little more. Sort of steady state and attractive steady state. I feel really good.
I presume pretty good benefits would be my guess.
They're excellent benefits. Exactly. I mean, good competitive pay and awesome benefits. I like to believe a culture that's pretty purpose driven.
Just, actually so. That I never even thought about asking. As a Principal employee, do I have access to all Principal benefits? It like what is the experience of it? Obviously, you are not a small employer.
We're not a gem--. Right.
You are. I assume that you are the, wherever possible, you're the familiar of your own.
Small story. I am in fact a vendor for Principal's HR department.
Mm-hmm.
I have to kind of put up a wall when I'm there as the vendor. They kept asking us if they could have access to our critical illness and accident products, and we held them off for years because we weren't sure the experience, the reporting, the types of things that we could provide for a large case like Principal was going to meet their needs. We held them off for two or three years and they actually just put it in production this year. We're comfortable with how that's going.
Humphrey, better benefits than Fallon?
No comment.
No comment? The answer is yes, Humphrey. It's just simply yes.
All right. Well, I want to thank Amy and Humphrey for the time we spent together. I hope you've had a good day. Hope you've all had a good day. AXIS is going to be next. You have a little bit of a break and thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
It's been great.